L-Word actress Leisha Hailey kissed her girlfriend on a Southwest flight from Baltimore to St. Louis… and promptly got kicked off the plane for it. Now, Hailey has taken to Twitter to call for a boycott of the airline, while Southwest is claiming that Hailey’s behavior was excessive, and that other passengers were complaining. The airline wrote on its website that the actress was approached “based solely on behavior and not gender.”
But Hailey — perhaps taking a cue from Alice, the fiery character she played on the long-running Showtime drama — says that she’s been discriminated against, and has called for a Southwest boycott. She claims that the flight attendant told her that Southwest was a family airline… and Hailey reacted by getting “verbally upset.” She issued a statement on Tuesday, calling for airline bosses to issue an apology.
Things could get even trickier, because Southwest is the official airline of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Hailey’s statement continues, “We want to live in a society where if your loved one leans over to give you an innocent kiss on an airplane it’s not labeled as ‘excessive or not family oriented’ by a corporation and its employees. We find it very disturbing that the same airline who lauds itself as being LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) friendly has twisted an upsetting incident that happened into our behavior being ‘too excessive’.”
